Category: Northern Ireland – Belfast

This exhibition is part of the BFI’s Britain on Film celebration of archive film, in partnership with Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive and it is shown at PS2 gallery in Belfast. The gallery has recently moved to new premises that used to house the biggest Northern Irish Fishing tackle shop J Braddell and Sons Ltd.

The Materialities of History project approaches the Northern Irish film heritage from a Finnish point of view. The artist Ulrika Ferm, originally from a small coastal town in Finland, was invited to respond to the Coast and Sea themed films at the Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film archive. In her research Ferm mainly focused on the Northern Ireland Tourist Board collection, which created films that aimed to sell Northern Ireland as a holiday destination. Members of staff documented the region through stills and moving images, the films they created capturing various facets of life in Northern Ireland, its society and history, people and places.

Ferm’s practice is interested in archival structures and the way history presents itself through visual material found in archives. The exhibition displays both edited and unedited footage from the Tourist Board collection and some other stately funded film productions such as UTV’s Richer and Rarer (1960). Contrasting the narrative storytelling intended to sell Northern Ireland, either as a tourist destination, or a place for investment, the artist has edited excerpts that emphasise the intrinsic repetition and negating its rootedness in place and time.

The exhibition is curated by Mirjami Schuppert, curator in residence at PS2.

As part of #CinemaDay17, the Naughton Gallery in collaboration with Us Folk, presents a special screening of Ghost World (112mins, dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001). The film has been selected by illustrator Jacky Sheridan, who has created a limited edition poster to mark the screening, bringing her own style to a film that has influenced her practice.

Based on the cult comic book by Daniel Clowes, Ghost World tells the story of Enid and Rebecca, teenage friends facing the unwelcome prospect of adulthood and the uncertain future of their complicated relationship. The film will be introduced by Jacky Sheridan, in conversation with the Naughton Gallery’s Ben Crothers.

Limited edition posters are free to all attendees, and donations are welcome. All proceeds will go to the Women’s TEC, supporting training and resources for women to work in non-traditional sectors.
Please RSVP to art@qub.ac.uk.

Celebrating the diversity and scope of film exhibition across Northern Ireland, Cinema Day is an initiative presented by Film Hub NI (part of the BFI Film Audience Network) and supported by Northern Ireland Screen. See www.filmhubni.org for more details.

On Saturday 12th August 2017, Framewerk art gallery presents an adaptation of Alvin Lucier’s seminal work I am Sitting in a Room to a live audience. Local sound artists Christopher Steenson and Richard Bailie have collaborated to adapt the piece for the unique setting of a bank vault. Titled I am Sitting in a Vault, the event will take place in the old Ulster Bank Building situated at 431 Newtonards Road, East Belfast. Musician Constance Keane will perform the piece on the night.

I am Sitting in a Vault will highlight how positive feedback systems are used to shape our everyday circumstances. Lucier’s original piece uses positive feedback loops as a compositional device. A performer narrates a text alone in a room while being audio recorded. This recording is then played back into the room and again recorded. This process is repeated over several iterations until the sound of the performer’s voice is overpowered by the resonant frequencies of the room; unveiling the inherent sonic architecture of the performance space to the listener, and transforming the performer’s voice into a time-evolving drone.

Systems of positive feedback are present in various aspects of everyday life. Existent in the principles of the free market, as well as in the mechanics of social media algorithms, feedback systems encourage the accumulation of excessive wealth and the storage of copious amounts of private data. In turn, this process increasingly hands power to a privileged few. By using the unique setting of bank to stage the performance, I am Sitting in a Vault will invite the audience to reflect on how endless accretion of money and data, and the feedback systems that underpin these atcivities, influence our socioeconomic world and the present hierarchies within it.

The performance will be held at 7:30pm on 12th August 2017 at 431 Newtonards Road, East Belfast. The event is free, but there is a suggested donation of £5 to help the artists cover costs.

10 August to 1 October 2017
The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s, Lanyon Building, Queen’s University, Belfast

Adham Faramawy (b.1981, Dubai) is a London-based artist of Egyptian descent whose work spans media including moving image, sculptural installation and print. The human body is central to Faramawy’s practice, approached as a primary, sensual site in which gender and sexuality are fluid. Live performances to camera are computer-mediated to create compelling, visceral, and sexually-charged works, displayed across a landscape of high definition flatscreens and sculptural assemblages.

Faramawy also engages and uses technology to discuss issues of embodiment and identity construction. He explores changes in perception brought about by the digital age, often drawing on the language of advertising, co-opting the special effects used to evoke desire for people, things and experiences.

This exhibition continues Magee’s experiments with a unique transcript of a truncated story voiced by a Northern Irish man. Originally a spoken word recording, the phonetic construction of the text resists any clear narrative, instead it details fragmented words and sentences while articulating the local dialect of the narrator. This content has been the focus of some investigations into the complex malleability of language, particularly its social developments in relation to digital technology.

By employing various online search tools to examine the text, a catalogue of pictorial and textual data accumulate to provide the basis for alternative constructions of the transcript. These various manifestations present a springboard to wider examinations of the plurality of language, and the implications and influence of screen time on verbal and written forms of expression.

The Chronotopes are devices and landscape structures deployed to disturb linearity. Antagonising at the scales of the Anthropocene where the human is implicated as a geological agent, these technical apparatus manifest affective alignments at a planetary resolution. The Chronotopes adopt the status of the monument, a category of spatial and temporal materialism with a linguistic comportment, to deploy a recalibration of space-time aesthetics. Only through nonlinear machinations is the sublime condition of Language comprehended in its authentic form, yet witnessed to have infected a materialism under geo-magnification.

Dave Loder is a Belfast-based artist-researcher pursuing a materialist philosophy of language. His art practice is manifested through the fabrication of technical objects that deploy alternative linguistic aesthetics and space-time conditions. He is currently following a thesis that proposes language as a parasitic entity, posing that language might be lying dormant in – or is capable of infecting – alternative materialisms. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in China, Spain and Germany, and has also presented research at Irish Museum of Modern Art (2015); the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and dOCUMENTA(13) (2012).

3 August to 1 September
Opening, Late Night Art Belfast, 3 August 6pm.

This year marks the 40th year of BPW, celebrations begin with an exhibition of over 50 selected prints from the membership and the BPW archive including work in Lithography, Etching, Carborundum and Silkscreen.

Diving Station is an installation by Belfast based artist Colm Clarke, set within the historic Templemore Swimming Baths. This new work centres around an audio installation and sculptural works that feature interviews, field recordings and material of the shifting legacies, architecture and ecologies around Templemore. Diving Station can be experienced in person, as an installation within the impressive building and at a listening post, situated in the grounds of The Bath House, around the corner.

Gary Shaw is a Belfast-based artist known for his bold and colourful geometric paintings. For the Bath House exhibition, Gary presents new drawings and sculptures originally inspired by images from a homemade holographic projector.

EastSide Visitor Centre is delighted to officially launch its new Art Gallery space with an exhibition by the renowned Belfast artist, Brian Ballard.

Born in Belfast, Brian Ballard trained firstly at the College of Art, Belfast, and then at the College of Art, Liverpool. He still lives in Belfast but spends long periods of time living and working on the remote and rugged island of Inishfree, off the coast of Donegal.

His artworks are infused with rich colours and textures. He paints directly onto the canvas with vigorous brushstrokes that leave their mark, recording the speed and the depth of the artist’s mind and showing the structural order, as well as the pictorial range, and using bold slashes of rich hues and subtle tones to capture the beauty in everyday objects.

This exhibition features a selection of paintings and drawings, including portraits of locals who are part of the East Belfast ‘Men’s Shed’ group.

This exhibition has been curated by the ArtisAnn Gallery, on Bloomfield Avenue, which is a 3-minute walk from the EastSide Visitor Centre.

The archetypal image of a building can be subtracted down to the basic shapes that make up the walls, roof and floor. In recognition of perspective Two Dimensional shapes and form can be simplified even further, to a geometric common denominator. Shapes emerge as non-structures but strangely recognisable as architectural forms. Utilizing construction and building materials SUBSTRATA attempts to extend the geometric into layered objects of interest. Aesthetic art objects, combining the veil of built walls and the veneer of material form.

Barry Mulholland is a Belfast based Visual Artist and studio member at Creative Exchange Artist’s Studios. Postgrad MA in Visual Arts Practices at Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) Dublin, 2015 and BA Fine Art in Ulster University, 2012. Previous co-director of Platform Arts and co-founder of South Studios, Belfast. Awards include, the recipient of the 2012 RDS Taylor Art Award, Dublin.

Late Night Art Belfast coach departs from the Linenhall Library at 6pm, wil be visiting numerous art galleries/spaces around east Belfast including Creative Exchange. £10 for bus tour. To book the bus tour please contact Rhonda on 07742101036 or visit www.belfastarttours.co.uk

Exploring the relationship between glass and light, and reflecting his observations and interpretation of Nebulae stars within the galaxies of the Universe, Keith’s glass art predominantly involves the infusion of metals into the glass. This process gives each sculptural form a further dimension of uniqueness and identity, enhancing the vibrant colourations.

These processes are transferred into Keith’s interpretation of the stars; depicting their existence, shaping their markings, clouds, and gases from their birth in Nebulae, to hot blue stars, red super giants and their eventual end in a Supernova explosion.

3 August to 2 September
The exhibition will be opened by Mary Ellen Campbell -Former Deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast on 3 August, 7pm

The Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast will host a unique exhibition, ‘Queeriosity’, featuring 24 artists. Showcasing the work of some of the best lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and supporter artists, this thought-provoking exhibition explores unconventional questions about the role of LGBTQ identities and experiences, interpreted through art.

Unafraid Yellow is the second of four exhibitions showing the work of QSS studio artists, curated by artist Colin Darke. It was preceded by Unafraid Red and will be followed by Unafraid Blue and White. Recognising that the task of dividing twenty-three artists and twenty-three very different stylistic practices into four thematic categories would result in spurious relationships, Darke settled on assemblages based around colour. This allows for a level of visual cohesion, while retaining the conceptual and aesthetic diversity that defines Queen Street Studios.

3 August to 16 September
Late Night Art Belfast, Thursday 3 August, 6pm

A survey exhibition in four parts across two venues that reveals 40 years of Alistair Wilson’s esoteric sculptural practice.
Wilson’s poetic structures come to life in the space between the romantic and the cerebral and exist in the “here and now.” Much more than a retrospective (spread over two venues in fact) this exhibition attempts to capture the diversity of his sculptures and drawings and recreates his quest to understand and transform the materials that surround him. The work itself deals with alchemy, order, chaos and metamorphosis.

Born in Penarth in 1951, Wilson studied at Preston Polytechnic, Bath Academy and Chelsea School of Art, also spending a year of postgraduate study in Berlin. He was course director of the Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Ulster until 2014. He has had numerous solo shows at the Oliver Dowling Gallery in Dublin and was one of 14 artists representing Northern Ireland in the 2005 Venice Biennale. In recent years he has had solo exhibitions in Derry, Manchester and Berlin.

7 July to 4 August
Opening Preview: 6 July, 6-9pm with a performance by Eoghan Ryan at 7.30pm

Catalyst Arts is delighted to present VIEWING COPY, an exhibition of work by artists Eoghan Ryan and Vivienne Dick alongside The Radical Film Archive and a newly commissioned text by Maeve Connolly.

This project is driven by an exploration into the hierarchical economy and circulation of video in artist moving image practice, directly referencing the particular and peculiar status of the ‘Viewing Copy’ within the market of contemporary art and its continued covert resistance to contemporary capitalism. The project considers the physicality of the screen and materiality of video formats as a framing device for autobiographical content, brought into focus as a measure and mediation of subjectivity, with the potential for generating alternative representations and a shared cultural, collective memory.

The object is not always the sole focus, but how it is placed and viewed is a constant preoccupation. For this exhibition Wilson has been influenced by the concept of Tableau Vivant, re-imaginings of still life paintings. These groupings are not recreations of artworks but rather they are varying references to placement, structure, form and space within them. Using the space to experiment with a series of compositions, he will reference recurring themes that have occupied his practice, such as his interest in British Constructivism, Minimalism, and De Stijl.

This exhibition, focusing on the themes of sea and summer, showcases some of Carol’s finest work over the past decade as well as some new pieces created especially for the exhibition.

Carol Graham works across genres and her ever-evolving images appeal to a wide range of art lovers. Carol trusts, and courageously follows, her inner voice. Her subject matter varies, including landscapes, seascapes, still life, horses, and spiritual, metaphorical and abstract images.

She often produces images in groups or in a series. Throughout her subject matter, from the most vibrant to the darkest, there is a consistent ethereal quality of light; Carol especially enjoys depicting dawn and dusk.

Carol is a highly renowned Irish painter who has received many prestigious commissions and awards, including serving as President of the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA) from 2003-2006.

Side Steps These Ferried Measures Rise is the first major institutional exhibition by Belfast based artist Bill Saunders, who works primarily in sculpture. In this exhibition, Saunders considers the very site where artwork is made — the profound “thinking space” that is the studio — as a source of inspiration for his work.

A Dream and an Argument represents a major new body of work by Edinburgh-born, Belfast based artist Dougal McKenzie. It brings together key elements of McKenzie’s practice: an interest in history and storytelling through images, and an investigation into whether it is possible to represent these as ‘memory’ in painting.